Partial Memories: Sketches from an Improbable Life

By Ernst von Glasersfeld

Autobiographical sketches by the philosopher and semioticist Ernst von Glasersfeld.

The author writes:
"Memories are a personal affair. They are what comes to mind when you think back, not what might in fact have happened at that earlier time in your life. You can no longer be certain of what seemed important then, because you are now looking at the past with today’s eyes. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico had that insight three hundred years ago: When we think of things that lie in the past, we see them in terms of the concepts we have now."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Dec 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781845405762

Book preview

Partial Memories

Sketches from an Improbable Life

Ernst von Glasersfeld

imprint-academic.com

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Copyright © Ernst von Glasersfeld, 2009, 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Imprint Academic

PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

In memory of my parents

who never worried about what people might say and gave me the courage to follow my own ideas.

Preface

Memories are a personal affair. They are what comes to mind when you think back, not what might in fact have happened at that earlier time in your life. You can no longer be certain of what seemed important then, because you are now looking at the past with today’s eyes. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico had that insight three hundred years ago: When we think of things that lie in the past, we see them in terms of the concepts we have now.

Neurophysiologists and science in general have no idea of how we manage to remember. Memory is still a miracle, no less than our capability of becoming aware of experiences.

I have at times returned to places where I had been fifty years earlier. I can say that my memories always contained a core that was compatible with the later experience; but they also had features that now seemed distorted or downright wrong. The discrepancies concerned not only visual impressions, landscapes, cities, houses, and the appearance of people, but also events, conversations, feelings, and the relationships with others.

I therefore have to stress that these sketches are sketches. They are not an autobiography and they make no claim to be objectively true. I recount what I manage to reconstruct and know full well that this may not be the way I experienced it at the time. I call my reminiscences partial, because on the one hand they are incomplete and on the other biased by my likes and dislikes.

People who are no longer alive I mention for the most part by the names they had when I knew them. To the living I have given other names, because I should hate to cause anyone embarrassment.

I sincerely thank Lisa Nelson for helpful suggestions, Marie Larochelle and Danielle Lochhead for proofreading, Jack Lochhead for his unfaltering support and Josef Mitterer for constant encouragement and spotting contradictions in my dating of events. I am grateful to Anthony Freeman of Imprint Academic for his exceptional patience and expert advice.

About Translation

When I decided that it was time to review and collect such sketches of the past as I had occasionally written my friend Josef Mitterer, who had read some of them, felt sure that they could be published in German. He found a publisher in Vienna who produced a little volume with 57 of them.[1] More than half of them had been written in English and needed to be translated. I do not know what determined the language I wrote them in, but it probably was the mood in which I happened to remember what then seemed worth recounting.

If you translate memories that are in fact your own, it happens that searching for ways to formulate them in this second language brings forth expressions that seem more appropriate than those you chose in the first. It may also remind you of details you had left out in your first account. So the translation sometimes led to an alteration of the original. This seemed to me a valuable process and I decided to translate the German originals into English. I know full well that the meaning of the two versions could never be the same - the fact that I had grown up with more than one language had taught me that; but the very task of formulating them in the other language sometimes showed possibilities of broadening the picture. Given that I do not consider myself a native speaker of either German or English, it does not worry me that readers of both languages may find my way with words a little foreign. That is as it should be. I have always striven to remain a foreigner no matter where I happened to be living.

E.v.G.

Amherst/Leverett, October 2008

1 Unverbindliche Erinnerungen, Folio Verlag, Vienna, 2008

‘One must remember that truth itself is always halved in utterance.’

-Lawrence Durrell (Balthazar)

Chapter One 1917–1936

My Parents

Not having become pregnant after seven years of marriage, my mother began to worry that she or her husband might be sterile. So they both went to see a doctor. He found nothing wrong with either of them and told them to go on trying. Spurred by the good news, they were soon successful. Fortunately this was long before fertility drugs were invented. I should not have liked being one of a litter of five or six.

I suppose children always find it difficult to imagine their parents conceiving them. I certainly could never visualize my father doing it. When I was a small boy, he still played tennis every now and then, not as a sport but for his health. Being moderate in everything, he decided that twenty minutes of exertion was about right. When he came to play with my mother or her sister - both were tournament players - he brought a large alarm clock and set it for twenty minutes. When it rang, he finished the game, thanked them for their trouble, and bicycled home to a hot bath. Much later, when I had been told how babies were made, I sometimes wondered whether he had followed the same pattern in his marital activities and, during the first seven years, had set the alarm too early.

* * *

Being pregnant did not stop my mother from continuing her sports. She played tennis and went skiing until well after the sixth month, and I remember her proudly recounting that right up to my birth she was able to put on her stockings standing on one leg. It was a picture that came to my mind at various occasions during my later life. There was always something of a Lausbub in my mother (brat is probably the best translation, provided one thinks of it with a hint of affection).

At boarding school I had spent weeks learning to whistle through my teeth, that shrill ear-splitting whistle that is louder than anything you could produce by putting fingers in your mouth. My jaw was hurting and my face threatened to stay permanently out of shape when at last the first piercing whistle came forth. It was during a history class and the appalled teacher could think of nothing better than to send me out of the room. This was no serious punishment because I was not very keen on history anyway; besides, I was so elated with my success that any punishment seemed a picnic. It allowed me immediately to solidify the technique.

When I came home for the summer holiday and my mother heard my new whistle, she tilted her head and said in her most innocent voice:

Could you teach me?

I said, I thought I could, but it would take a long time, it would be painful, and she might even get cramps in her jaw.

Will you do it, if I double your pocket money?

It was a challenge I could not resist. My mother, of course was a perfect student, fanatical almost. Whenever she was alone or when there was no one but me in sight, she practiced. The trouble is that it takes a long time to get comfortable pushing your lower jaw as far out in front of the upper one as you can; and it’s only when that position is easy to hold, that you can begin to try for a sound. It took all the holiday but in the end my mother got it. She found it useful when she was driving her open roadster and a cyclist was not keeping to his side. It’s more effective than the horn, she would say. But she used it also in more uncommon situations. Once we were going out to meet friends of hers for lunch. She was wearing a rather elegant dress and had put on a hat, which she rarely did. On the way to the restaurant she wanted to buy a pair of gloves and we went into a big shop. There was no one else in it and two sales girls were gossiping at the other end of the counter. My mother waited a moment for one of them to come, but they didn’t move. So my mother pushed her jaw forward and produced a marrow-curdling whistle. It hit the girls like an electric shock and they came scampering across. My mother smiled and said:

Thank you for your attention, I’d like a pair of black gloves.

* * *

The most salient memories of my mother, however, are from the times she took me skiing. I must have been about seven when she decided I was good enough to come with her on excursions. There were no ski lifts or cable cars in those days and if you wanted to ski, you first had to walk up. You put strips of sealskin on the soles of your skis. The hair on them is fairly stiff, it lies flat in one direction, and stops your skis from sliding back when you walk uphill. One of the first trips my mother took me on was in the Dolomites. It was a three-day hike from the Val Gardena over three passes to Cortina. Each day you climbed up to a pass, a climb of about three hours, and then you skied down to the valley on the other side and stayed over night in the first village. There was not a track of another skier anywhere, just deep powder snow wherever you went.

Of course, I hated the walking up, but my mother was wonderfully patient and coaxed me along until we could finally take off the sealskins and start going down. And that I enjoyed enormously.

In Cortina my mother met some of her friends at an international jumping competition. The Norwegians were then the unbeatable masters in that discipline, but they had never practiced downhill skiing. After the competition, a few of the jumpers decided to try the run down from Pocol, which was then the top station of one of the first cable cars in the Alps. My mother took me along and I had a great time. There happened to be the worst kind of snow for skiing, the kind that is called breakable crust. It has an icy crust that is just not strong enough to carry the skier. It breaks along the edge of the skis and holds them as in rails. The only way to change direction is to jump right out of it. But not if you are as light as an eight-year-old. I sailed down on top of the crust, making all the turns I wanted to make and trying not to laugh at the clumsy adults who were struggling in the most inelegant fashion.

* * *

Of my father, too, I have only pleasant memories. Once I had learned to respect his privacy he was the gentlest of friends. He never forced himself upon me, but whenever I went to him with a question, he was ready to help. He was good with his hands and early on he showed me how to use tools. Only once did he show annoyance. I was five or six years old and we had just moved into the house he had had built for us in Meran (an old spa in the South Tyrol, the part of Austria that became Italy after the First World War). He had bought a number of tools and showed them to me. Among them was a small stone chisel that fascinated me because I had never seen one before. He showed me how to hold it at an angle so that it would not jar your hand when you hit it with the hammer. I remembered this the next morning and wanted to try it out. By the time he came to see what I was hammering on the balcony, I had made a sizeable hole into the brand new wall of the house. The way he picked up the hammer and grabbed the chisel out of my hand left no doubt that he was very angry. But all he said was:

You go up to your room and stay there!

It may be that he was so controlled because his father was something of a tyrant and tended to lose his temper. As far as I know, this grandfather, who died long before I was born, did only one good thing for my father. He wanted him to be a military man, too, and in a cavalry regiment that he admired. So he sent him to the best riding school, which, he rightly thought, was the circus. I think it was the only pleasant memory my father had from his childhood. Unlike Thomas Mann’s hero Felix Krull, what my father saw at the circus did not launch him on an impostor’s career. What he got from it was a great deal of skill with horses, some skill in juggling with three or four balls, and infinite equanimity with regard to the strangeness of other people. The last served him throughout his life: When people did things he did not like, he simply kept out of their way. I was able to learn some of that attitude from him and am as grateful for it as I am for the love of fun and the passion for snow and mountains that my mother instilled into me with unfaltering patience.

Boarding School 1928

It was a long drive that for the first time took me to Neubeuern, the boarding school my parents had chosen. It also was a silent drive. I was about eleven years old and had no conception of what it would be like to be away from home; but I was frightened. I did not know why, but I knew it would be awful. In the past my parents had sometimes gone on trips and left me at home, early on with the Kinderfräulein, and more recently I had been considered old enough to stay by myself with only the housekeeper. But what was ahead, I knew, would be altogether different - unimaginable and frightful. I was desperately hoping for something to happen, so that we would never get there.

My mother, too, was obviously depressed. The night before, when she was packing my things, I noticed that she was crying. Let’s not go, I said. But she merely shook her head and so I, too, began to cry. It all seemed different from anything that had happened before - incomprehensible and unspeakably ominous.

I was sitting in the back of the car and stared straight ahead without seeing. When I caught my mother looking at me in the rearview mirror, I turned my head away. I knew she was worried, and I could not understand it. Why had she decided to do this, when she did not like it? Was it to punish me? I had not been told that I had done anything wrong. I simply could not find an answer.

My mother was also worried that I was worrying. At one point she said: You know, we are going to see Konrad ... that will be nice, won’t it?

I did not answer. It seemed totally beside the point to me. It was true, I liked Konrad a lot, but what did that have to do with my being sent to boarding school?

Konrad, who was about my mother’s age, was an engineer with a passion for cars. It was he who had taught my mother not only to drive but also all about ignition and carburetors and gears, and he had accompanied her on her first long drives. You don’t learn to drive in a couple of weeks, he said, it takes at least 5000 kilometers.

Cars in those days differed a great deal and almost every new model incorporated some novel solution to a problem. Konrad kept up with them all by reading technical journals; but what he liked best was to see them for himself. When we went for walks together - which seemed to happen quite often when my parents and I came to Munich, where Konrad lived - he might stop dead in his tracks and point to a car coming out of some street:

Look, look! That is the new Delage - it has four-wheel brakes!

And we would try to follow the car, hoping that it would stop and we could look at it more closely. If we were lucky and got there before the owner had disappeared, Konrad would raise his hat and say:

"Excuse me, Sir, could you possibly let us see the engine? This is the first Delage Gran Sport that has come our way."

And the owners of new cars were often only too happy to show them off and talk about them. So I learned a good many things about cars.

At some time, Konrad had also given driving lessons to my father, but my father was not really interested. He never went for the test to take out the required license. He loved to be driven and he trusted my mother. He left everything to do with the car to her - its choice when a new one had to be bought, its maintenance and the repairs on the road (which were not infrequent in those days), and above all the driving. He hardly ever looked at the road ahead but scanned the landscape on either side for the things that interested him: peasant houses, flowers, old trees, and the mountains that formed the background to most of our drives. He never showed any nervousness and never commented on what my mother was doing or not doing. As in many other realms of living, he was a perfect passenger, a little silent perhaps, but also forever uncomplaining. That is, with one exception. When another car was driving ahead of us, my father became restless and after a while he would say: If you can’t pass him, let him get further away - I cannot stand the smell.

My mother was a spirited driver and she especially enjoyed going up mountain passes as fast as the car would go. They were all dirt roads then, and she was an expert in judging just how much skidding was useful in the hairpin turns. As a result we often caught up with the dust of slower drivers. That was when my father complained.

Well, I can’t stop right here, my mother would say, and it’s bad for the engine to pull uphill slowly.

Occasionally my father, who in time had picked up quite a lot about cars, would gently ask:

But couldn’t you go in a lower gear?

My mother would sigh and pull up abruptly as soon as the road was wide enough for another car to pass.

I need to stretch my legs anyway, my father would say, and amble into the landscape. Sensing my mother’s displeasure, I would follow him. Often the slopes were wooded, with little clearings here and there, where one could look down at the villages in the valley. There were hardly ever people to be seen, but we did not miss them. My father would point out mushrooms and explain what they were, or he would turn over stones with his walking stick and talk about the beetles that had hidden underneath. If we were already above the tree line, he would carefully move the alpine flowers with his stick without hurting them and talk at length about the ones he liked best. It was not that I had a burning interest in those things, but the affection with which he spoke of them was somehow contagious and I often ran ahead to point specimens out to him. Much later I realized that I had learned a lot during those walks; useless knowledge, from a mundane point of view, but endlessly rewarding the moment you stepped into a forest or an Alpine meadow.

But on this drive the mountains and the Alpine flowers were far away. All that, I felt, had come to an end. I was going to be stuck in school, immeasurably far from everything I liked, without my parents, without cars, without forests and meadows, and without the electric railway, which, I think, was my main interest at the time.

As I had been afraid all along, the drive came to an end. The road climbed up a steep hill that stood like a forepost of the Alps where they merged into the Bavarian plain south of Munich - and there it was, dark and ominous: Neubeuern, the large, thick-walled, rambling castle that had been turned into a boarding school.

As we got out of the car, I think, I must have begun to tremble. I was about to break into tears.

Look, my mother said, you can see the Wendelstein!

She pointed to a peak in the serrated skyline of the Alps, far away at the horizon. It was a mountain we had skied on the year before, and for a moment the memory distracted me. Then we trotted to the director’s office and I felt too numb to cry. Herr Rieder was a very big man with a large, perfectly round hairless head and a soft, noncommittal voice. I don’t remember hearing anything that was said, but I have never forgotten his double-breasted suit that enveloped his bulging stomach like a cylindrical tent. It must have been this first sight that generated my life-long aversion against double-breasted suits.

What I remember of the director’s office is that it was somber, smelt of cigar smoke, and I wanted to get out. This impression was reinforced later, because the director’s office was where you were brought when you had done something wrong.

My parents’ interview was cut short. There was a knock on the door, the Director said Herein!, and a middle-aged man - probably one of the teachers - tiptoed towards him and whispered something in his ear. The director turned to my parents and said:

A visitor has arrived for you; he is waiting in the courtyard.

I suppose my parents, though for different reasons, did not feel any more comfortable than I during the interview and were quite happy to end it.

It’s a friend of the family, my mother said apologetically, and we trooped out of the office. I had no idea who it could be, but as we came out through the big door into the courtyard, I saw Konrad unloading a bicycle from the roof of his little car.

One of the things I had been told the first time boarding school was mentioned, was that I would get a new bicycle. I had had one for several years, but it was now a little battered and too small. I don’t think the promise diminished the fear and forebodings I felt at the prospect of being sent away, but a new bicycle was an attractive idea and I dwelt on it quite a lot. I had a very clear picture of what I wanted. It had to be one of those light, fragile looking ones, bright blue or silver, with narrow rims and caliper brakes and a handlebar like a racer.

The thing that Konrad was now wheeling towards us left me dumbfounded. Had I been able to verbalize my impression, I would have said, it looks like a hearse. It was the opposite of my dream. It was black and heavy, with thick tires and clumsy mudguards, and if you put a big basket behind the saddle it would have been the image of the bicycle that every morning brought bread and groceries to our house in Meran.

At the age of ten years, there are many things you feel but do not articulate conceptually, let alone in words. They are dark, amorphous masses in your world, and every now and then they push you into a corner, relentlessly and incomprehensibly. I did not say to myself: How could they do this? But I knew that I had to say Thank you for a surprise that was not just a disappointment but something like an insult.

I have few recollections of the rest of the day. My mother was crying again when they said Good Bye, and I do not remember my father. Much later, when I got to know and like him as a person, I realized that he must have been almost as uncomfortable that day as I was.

I was shown to the room I was to share with three others, and the trunk that had come with me was brought up. There were four narrow wardrobes and the empty one, I was told, was mine. Left alone, I started unpacking and it quickly became clear that there was not nearly enough room for all my things. The wardrobe was about 18 inches wide, with one shelf on top, two at the bottom, and a space to hang clothes in between. My mother had packed my clothes and helped me select the toys to bring, a tiny fraction of what I would have liked to take. I now carefully arranged them on the bottom shelves. They were not really toys, but a few small things with which I was used to spending time - a pathfinder’s compass, a paper weight one could shake to create a snow storm, a small camera with a couple of rolls of film, some puzzles with rings and hooks, a few picture books, and two stuffed animals. The biggest item was a large box with old alarm clocks in various stages of deconstruction and small pliers and screw drivers. The year before I had caught German measles and was confined to bed and dimmed light for three or four weeks. To keep me happy, my mother had a brilliant idea. She went to a watchmaker and came back with an assortment of broken clocks. As she anticipated, the challenge to get one of them to work again turned the days in bed into a thrilling adventure and I returned to my clock collection many times after I had got well.

I managed to stuff shoes, socks, and pullovers on the top shelf, but the trunk was still more than half full with clothes and underwear, ski boots and gloves, a box of pencils and a writing pad, and a framed photograph of my parents which my mother had slipped in. I looked round the room for other possibilities, but there were four beds and four chairs and that was it.

I was sitting on one of the beds, when the door opened and in came a large woman in a dark grey skirt and blouse that had small white buttons all the way up to her chin.

Ah, she said cheerfully, you are von Glasersfeld, the new boy!

I got up and stared at her. No one had ever called me by that name. Even if I had had another, she left me no time to say so.

Good! You have been unpacking.

She looked at the open wardrobe and knitted her brows in an ominous frown. But then she turned to me with the same smile she had worn when she came in and said:

I’m afraid we’ll have to organize your things differently - this is not like home. You understand, don’t you?

I am sure I had less experience of the world than many others at that age, but I had learned to recognize and to dislike the expression of spurious friendliness and concern. It was part of that ominous conspiracy of strange adults.

My introduction into the life of the school began at dinner time. There were ten or twelve long tables in the dining room for about a dozen inmates each. Someone showed me to a free place and said:

This is von Glasersfeld.

The boys who were sitting there seemed to be amused. One of them asked:

Does this mean the field of the Glaser or the Glaser of the field?

They all laughed, and it did not matter that I would not have known how to answer. Then the teacher at the head of the table turned to me:

What class are you coming into, von Glasersfeld?

I said that I was to enter the second.

Where did you do the first?

I had private lessons.

Ah, that is interesting - I hope you learned some Latin, because that is what I teach!

Everybody laughed, and it was the end of the conversation as far as I was concerned. The soup was served, and asI raised the first spoonful to my mouth, the boy on my right pushed my elbow, and it spilled. Again, all the others laughed. The teacher uttered a mild reprimand, but it was not clear to me whether it was aimed at the boy who had pushed me or at me. Much later, whenI saw it happen to other new boys, I realized that it was part of a ritual.

Indeed, the initiation rites are what I remember best of that first and fortunately short boarding school experience. When the lights had gone out and I was lying in the strange bed with three others in the room, the weight of it all became too much for me and I started crying, softly and desperately.

Don’t cry, one of them said, you’ll get used to it.

I don’t remember all they did to console me, but for the sake of humanity I want to say that they did a lot. They asked me where I came from, and then some questions that I could not answer. For instance, Why had I been sent there? And then there was a question that I did not understand: Have you been aufgeklärt? - the German word means enlightened. Aufklärung is the German term for the eighteenth-century period called The Enlightenment. The fact that I didn’t know what they were referring to delighted them no end. For a long time, that night, they continued to explore just how much I didn’t know; especially about sex.

My mother had explained to me that, before being born, I was in her tummy. It never struck me to ask how I got there. My ignorance was therefore total in the area that most occupied my new schoolmates. They enjoyed their advantage over me enormously, but after one more night of flaunting it, they could not resist telling me all about it. So they began to enlighten me. My reaction exhilarated them, because I flatly refused to believe what they described in very simple terms. It seemed utterly absurd to me. My reluctance eked them on to present more and more graphic details and to recount what older brothers had told them. A few days later, when my first religion lesson had supplied me with a bible, they took the trouble to show me several passages which they took to be evidence for what they had told me, and after a while I began to consider that they were probably right.

Many years later, when I told my mother the story of my enlightenment, she was taken aback.

Good God, she said, I should have told you - but it never occurred to me, it somehow never came up. But don’t worry about not believing it at first. Frank Wedekind, whom we saw a few times when we lived in Munich, once remarked that as long as babies are made the way we make them, nothing about the human species can surprise him.

In time I got used to the regimented life in school, to the horrible electric bells that shrieked through the castle and regulated our day, and to the strange customs that governed the interactions among the boys. But every now and then something happened that shook me so much that I wrote about it in my letters home.

Two of the teachers had the name Müller; Karl Müller, a gentle, easy man who taught geography and was referred to as Herr K-Müller; and Otto Müller, called Herr O-Müller, the Latin teacher, who walked like a ram rod with a limp and frequently reminded us that he had defended the fatherland on the western front throughout the four years of the First World War. He was subject to uncontrollable fits of rage and had a particular, nasty way of pulling up your head by your ear before slapping your face. On the days when he was supervising the upper floor, where our bedrooms were, everybody tried to remain as invisible as possible.

One afternoon I forgot that it was O-Müller’s day and was sitting on my bed when he burst into the room. Perhaps he had been displeased by the look of some rooms where he found no one to blame. He was obviously boiling with rage. He went straight to the four wardrobes and tore them open.

Is this how you manage your quarters? he shouted as he turned to me. He took one step and reached for my ear - but I was closer to the door than he. I made a dash for it and ran down the corridor at full speed, O-Müller after me. Just before I reached the staircase, a boy coming out of his room opened a door just in front of me, and I crashed into it.

The boy helped me pick myself up and suddenly said in a shocked voice:

You are bleeding!

I began to cry, and Herr O-Müller, who was staring at the cut in my forehead, was immobilized by a fit of trembling that shook all of his stiff body.

I saw the blood on my hand after I had touched my face, and I suppose it was this that